CA Buys NimSoft As Cloud Spree Continues

CA today continued its cloud computing buying spree, announcing that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire monitoring provider Nimsoft, Inc. for $350 million in cash. The deal follows CA’s recent acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore and the planned acquisition of 3Tera.

Nimsoft offers “unified monitoring” that can monitor and benchmark data center environments as well as Google Apps, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and EC2, Salesforce.com and other cloud environments services. A complete API is available to both customers and third party developers to enable extensions to NMS.

CA said buying Nimsoft will boost its offerings for enterprises and MSPs. “With our planned acquisition of Nimsoft, CA will be equipped to capture several important growth market segments—including emerging enterprises, emerging national economies, and the MSPs who are providing these customers with IT management services via the cloud,” said Chris O’Malley, CA’s executive vice president, Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line. “Penetration of these markets will further expand our global leadership in IT management and complement our existing strength with large enterprise customers.”

Nimsoft was originally established as Nimbus Software in 1998 and renamed Nimsoft in 2004. It has approximately 800 customers, including nearly 300 MSPs and operates primarily in the United States and Europe.

“CA and Nimsoft are a perfect match,” said Gary Read, Nimsoft president and CEO, who will be joining CA. “We are joining a company that wrote the book on enterprise management. We’re bringing a very strong track record of success in the hosted and managed services segment and with mid-market enterprises. CA clearly shares our commitment to address customers’ evolving requirements for the management of their IT systems, including their move to virtualization and the cloud.”

Nimsoft’s operations will report under CA’s Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line. It is anticipated that the majority of Nimsoft’s approximately 120 employees will remain with CA after the completion of the transaction, which is expected to close by the end of CA’s fourth fiscal quarter, ending March 31, 2010. The acquisition is expected to have minimal impact on fiscal year 2010 results and to be dilutive to earnings per share in fiscal year 2011.

About the Author

Rich Miller is the founder and editor at large of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

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